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Monday, December 19, 2011

A 1936 movie about the life and times of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr, "America's Greatest Showman". The movie is "suggested by romances and incidents" so we don't have the true story of his life. Played by William Powell, the movie follows Ziegfeld from sideshow barker (at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair) to creator of the Ziegfeld Follies, the Broadway shows which helped launch the careers of Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor (all who appear as themselves).

The movie is long (185 minutes) and we see several musical numbers in their entirety (the 8 minute "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" is amazing, even for someone who isn't a fan of showy musical numbers). The movie won Best Picture, and Luise Rainer (as Ziegfeld's first big star, and first wife, Anna Held) won best actress. Powell's "Thin Man" costar Myrna Loy appears late in the movie as Billie Burke, Ziegfeld second wife (who would play the good witch in "The Wizard of Oz" three years later (along with Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow).

The most recent book from one of our (by "our" I mean SF...since I do consider Stephenson a SF writer) most interesting writers (and a fairly successful one by SF standards). In ways, this is a bit of a throw back to some of his earlier works, since it's basically a thriller, with no real SF elements.

Richard Forthrast, former draft dodger and marijuana smuggler, has created T'Rain, a massively successful mulitplayer online role-playing game. His game is successful enough that it's a target for hackers, which have unleashed a virus that encrypts someones data, and requires them to go into the game and pay to get the encryption key.

Richard's niece Zula (adopted) runs afoul of Russian mobsters that are victims of the hackers, and finds herself in China, trying to help track down the hackers. From there we get Islamic terrorists, CIA agents and a thrill ride that leads back to North America, and Richard Forthrast old smuggling trail.

At over a thousand pages, many would say that it's much too long for an effective thriller, but this is Stephenson, and we get his usual digressions about any topic which interests him...and luckily for us, they usually interests us also. This isn't as challenging as his last book, but Anathem suffered at time from being too serious. Reamde is a ton of fun.

Monday, December 5, 2011

These are the first two books in the "Charlie Fox" thriller series, written by Zoe Sharp. In the first book, Charlie is making a living teaching self defense to women, after being kicked out of the Army Special Forces (for reasons that become clear in the course of the book). There are a series of murder/rapes going on, and the newest one is a woman that Charlie had a run in with at the New Adelphi club. Charlie is offered a job working security at the club by it's owner, Marc Quinn, and begins to suspect there's a link between the club and the serial killer.

Charlie is a great character. Dangerous, well trained but with baggage, she is in the category of "kick butt females" (she even rides a motorcycle) but Sharp handles this territory well, with Charlie being capable but not a super woman.

The second book has Charlie house sitting for a friend in Lavender Gardens estates while working at a gym. There are teenage gangs running around and the neighbors have decided to employ a security firm since they feel the police can't maintain order. It's a powder keg waiting to go off, and when a young Asian boy is killed in what looks like a racially motivated killing, the situation turns ugly quickly. Things become more difficult for Charlie when someone from her Army past shows up.

We see incremental growth in Charlie in the second book, with a bit of thawing out between she and her parents, and understand a bit more of her Army background. I sped through this second book, and then went and grabbed books 3, 4 and 5 from the Kindle store. I'm interested in seeing how Sharp develops Charlie further.

I can remember reading the novelization of these when I was a kid, but don't know that I actually watched the movies (originally released in 1974) beyond bits and pieces on a network movie showing. Several years ago I finally read Dumas' novel (in a newly released translation at the time) and enjoyed it a lot. I then watched the Gene Kelly movie version, and liked it also (though I think Kelly was a bit old to be D'Artagnan). Now, with Lester's adaption (with script by George MacDondal Fraser) I've seen what many consider to be the definitive movie version.

It's certainly a lot of fun, with some great casting (Oliver Reed is perfect, and Charlton Heston is very good as Richelieu). The fights are great, with the Musketeers using whatever is handy as weapons. I would like to see the 1921 Douglas Fairbanks version, which many say is a template for Lester's films.

A big plus on cover design...the striking designs of the covers convinced me to look at the books (while browsing Barnes & Nobel). I then looked at the Amazon write ups, and decided to try the first book. It read fast enough that I followed up quickly with the other two.

I enjoyed the books, though at times the main character seems just too much ("no...I won't fail..."). He's possibly the smartest man in the world (though he's barely a man) and in the first book finds the key to the Theory of Everything (this leads to anti gravity in book two, and we see micro black holes in book three).

Set in London (the "Metrozone") with the U.K. in near anarchy, the US a theocracy and Japan destroyed, Petrovitch is a Russian with a past, working on his PhD. A chance encounter with Sonja Oshicora (daughter of a Japanese gangster) has Petrovitch foiling her kidnapping.

We get an AI (called Michael in later books), the futher collaspe of the Metrozone, and CIA hit teams coming after our hero. Oh...and a warrior nun, who becomes Petrovitch's wife, and then develops trust issues.

The books are over the top, but a good bit of fun. Might be interesting to see what Morden comes up with next.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

In 2009, American colleges handed out more business degrees than engineering, computer and biology degrees combined. We graduated about the same number of engineers as we did “Visual And Performance Arts” grads.

Alas, despite the fact that engineers are both well-paid and in short supply, The New York Times [NYT] reports “roughly 40 percent of college students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.”

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

My favorite part of the piece, when Jobs and Gates faced off in the 1980’s

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Friday, August 12, 2011

I didn't really follow this, and thus didn't vote on anything. I did look at the results, and thought I would at least figure out which ones I had read. Their rules on series is a little odd, and so there's cases where I had read one or two of a group.

For the listing below, those in red are ones that I've read, those in blue are series where I've read some, while those in black are unread.

1

The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy

J.R.R. Tolkien

2

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Douglas Adams

3

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

4

The Dune Chronicles

Frank Herbert

5

A Song Of Ice And Fire Series

George R. R. Martin

6

1984

George Orwell

7

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

8

The Foundation Trilogy

Isaac Asimov

9

Brave New World

Aldous Huxle

10

American Gods

Neil Gaiman

11

The Princess Bride

William Goldman

12

The Wheel Of Time Series

Robert Jordan

13

Animal Farm

George Orwell

14

Neuromancer

William Gibson

15

Watchmen

Alan Moore

16

I, Robot

Isaac Asimov

17

Stranger In A Strange Land

Robert Heinlein

18

The Kingkiller Chronicles

Patrick Rothfuss

19

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

20

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

21

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

22

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

23

The Dark Tower Series

Stephen King

24

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke

25

The Stand

Stephen King

26

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

27

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury

28

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut

29

The Sandman Series

Neil Gaiman

30

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

31

Starship Troopers

Robert Heinlein

32

Watership Down

Richard Adams

33

Dragonflight

Anne McCaffre

34

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Robert Heinlein

35

A Canticle For Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller

36

The Time Machine

H.G. Wells

37

20000 Leagues Under the Sea

Jules Verne

38

Flowers For Algernon

Daniel Keys Moran

39

The War Of The Worlds

H.G. Wells

40

The Chronicles Of Amber

Roger Zelaznz

41

The Belgariad

David Eddings

42

The Mists Of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley

43

The Mistborn Series

Brandon Sanderson

44

Ringworld

Larry Niven

45

The Left Hand Of Darkness

Ursula K. LeGuin

46

The Silmarillion

J.R.R. Tolkien

47

The Once And Future King

T.H. White

48

Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman

49

Childhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke

50

Contact

Carl Sagan

51

The Hyperion Cantos

Dan Simmons

52

Stardust

Neil Gaiman

53

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson

54

World War Z

Max Brooks

55

The Last Unicorn

Peter S. Beagle

56

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

57

Small Gods

Terry Pratchett

58

The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant

Stephen R. Donaldson

59

The Vorkosigan Saga

Lois McMaster Bujold

60

Going Postal

Terry Pratchett

61

The Mote In God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

62

The Sword Of Truth

Terry Goodkind

63

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

64

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

65

I Am Legend

Richard Matheson

66

The Riftwar Saga

Raymond E. Feist

67

The Shannara Trilogy

TerryBrooks

68

The Conan The Barbarian Series

R.E. Howard

69

The Farseer Trilogy

Robin Hobb

70

The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger

71

The Way Of Kings

Brandon Sanderson

72

A Journey To The Center Of The Earth

Jules Verne

73

The Legend Of Drizzt Series

R.A. Salvatore

74

Old Man's War

John Scalzi

75

The Diamond Age

Neil Stephenson

76

Rendezvous With Rama

Arthur C. Clarke

77

The Kushiel's Legacy Series

Jacqueline Carey

78

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. LeGuin

79

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ray Bradbury

80

Wicked

Gregory Maguire

81

The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series

Steven Erikson

82

The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde

83

The Culture Series

Iain M. Banks

84

The Crystal Cave

Mary Stewart

85

Anathem

Neal Stephenson

86

The Codex Alera Series

Jim Butcher

87

The Book Of The New Sun

Gene Wolfe

88

The Thrawn Trilogy

Timothy Zahn

89

The Outlander Series

Diana Gabaldan

90

The Elric Saga

Michael Moorcock

91

The Illustrated Man

Ray Bradbury

92

Sunshine

Robin McKinlez

93

A Fire Upon The Deep

Vernor Vinge

94

The Caves Of Steel

Isaac Asimov

95

The Mars Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson

96

Lucifer's Hammer

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

97

Doomsday Book

Connie Willis

98

Perdido Street Station

China Mieville

99

The Xanth Series

Piers Anthony

100

The Space Trilogy

C.S. Lewis

Some general notes/comments:

"The Thrawn Triolgy" by Timothy Zahn? A nice addition to Lucas' Star Wars universe (and one of the last things I paid attention to, particulary after the disappointing prequels) but they aren't great literature.

Sigh...outside of the first couple, why include Anthony's Xanth series?

Is Robin McKinley's "Sunshine" held in that high of regard?

Wow, lot more Neil Gaiman books on the list than I would have expected.